The week after Spring Break (March 26-29) is Career Week at UMBC!

I recommend that you each check out at least one of the lunchtime Career Conversations on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday - "Cashing in on Internships," "Securing a Professional Engineering License," and "Getting into Graduate School" are just a few of the offerings.

The Spring Career Fair is on Thursday (3/29).  There will be employers looking to fill internships as well as permanent positions (especially for CoE&IT majors), so if you're STILL trying to nail down an internship for the summer, check it out!  Be sure to dress professionally, and bring copies of your resumé!

One event that I recommend for all students is the Business and Dining Etiquette Dinner.  It is critical for you all to have the ability to make a good impression in ANY setting, particularly when you are first building your reputation in the professional world.  Having had the opportunity to dine with all sorts of speakers and invited guests when I was an undergraduate (remember my lunch with Jane Goodall?), I know that being comfortable with all the rules of politeness that are expected in a formal setting gives you one less thing to worry about when you are trying to look smart and accomplished in front of someone you have long admired (or, someone who could give you a job). These dinners are offered at times other than Career Week, so please take the time to participate in one at some point during your UMBC career!

For more details about Career Week events, follow the link below!

Judea Pearl has won the 2011 A.M. Turing Award for "fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning." Pearl pioneered the use of Bayesian networks and causal modeling as an approach to reasoning with uncertain knowledge and made man other contributions to probabilistic approaches to artificial intelligence. He has been a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA since 1970.

The Turing Award is ACM's most prestigious technical award and given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing. The award is sometimes referred to as the "Nobel Prize" of Computing and is named in honor of the British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Mathison Turing.

AASHE will have a booth at the 8th annual National Sustainable Design Expo on the National Mall in Washington D.C. on April 21-23.
The expo is the final phase of the EPA's P3 program (People, Prosperity, and the Planet). This unique competition is for college and universities working to design innovative solutions for a sustainable future.
For the first phase of the competition, teams are awarded a $15,000 grant to develop their idea. They then bring the design in April to the National Sustainable Design Expo to compete for the P3 Award and a grant of $90,000 to take their design to real world application.

Is your campus attending? If so, please stop by our booth and say hello. Hope to see you there!

More information is available below:

• 2011 P3 Award Winners
• Photo gallery from past P3 expos
• Main P3 website

The Wall Street Journal’s Amir Efrati has an article (Google Gives Search a Refresh) and blog post (What Google’s Search Changes Might Mean for You) on upcoming changes Google to its search engine to exploit semantic data.

“Google is undergoing a major, long-term overhaul of its search-engine, using what’s called semantic Web search to enhance the current system in the coming years. The move, starting over the next few months, will impact the way people can use the search engine as well as how the search engine examines sites across the Web before ranking them in search results.
…
A Google spokesman said the company wouldn’t comment on future search-engine features. But people familiar with the initiative say that Google users will able to browse through the company’s “knowledge graph,” or its ever-expanding database of information about “entities”—people, places and things—the “attributes” of those entities and how different entities are connected to one another.
…
Some open standards come from the W3C Semantic Web and Schema.org, which the major search engine players including Google have agreed to recognize, Cornett said.